Toby Harnden was the Daily Telegraph's US Editor, based in Washington DC, from 2006 to 2011. Click here for Toby's website. Follow him on Twitter here @tobyharnden and on Facebook here. He is the author of the bestselling book Dead Men Risen: The Welsh Guards and the Defining Story Britain's War in Afghanistan.

American Way: Debt ceiling victory for Tea Party could end its revolution

On one level, the epic tussle taking place on Capitol Hill over the raising of the national debt ceiling was business as usual in Washington. The American constitution laid down that government should be divided between the executive, legislative and judicial branches.

When the legislature itself – Congress – is split between the two parties, gridlock necessarily ensues. This has long been the price that the United States pays for keeping its government in check.

Inside the Capitol there was no shortage of age-old politicking. The Republican-controlled House of Representatives struggled to pass a bill that it knew would not become law. The Democratic-controlled Senate promptly defeated it and then moved to consider another bill, equally doomed to failure.

Each side called on the other to put politics aside. Talking points were uttered ad nauseum and ritual insults hurled.

In fact, however, what was happening was unprecedented. I’m not referring to the debt ceiling issue itself, though the prospect of the United States going into default on Tuesday for the first time in history certainly fell into that category.

What was more significant was the revolution taking place inside the Capitol, where a group of some two dozen determined Republicans revolted against their party and declared: “No more.”

The two dozen were all Tea Party members, the hard core of 59 aligned with the small-government, anti-tax group that enabled Republicans to recapture the House of Representatives last November.

Having been elected to turn Washington upside down by slashing spending and resisting President Barack Obama’s expansion of government, compromise was not part of their vocabulary.

When the Tea Partiers arrived in the US capital, the word among the city’s revolving, permanent establishment was that they would soon be co-opted. Last week demonstrated that this was wrong.

With the gap between the House bill drawn up by Speaker John Boehner and the Senate bill of Senator Harry Reid relatively narrow, there remains every possibility this weekend that an 11th-hour deal will be cut and duly signed into law by Obama.

Only the Tea Party rump, it seems, can prevent this happening in what would be an act that could ultimately halt the dramatic change they have already brought to Washington in six short months.

Remarkably, both the Boehner and Reid – and the inevitable compromise bill that will emerge from them early this week – slash the annual deficit without raising taxes. It marks a retreat by Democrats who, controlling the White House and Senate, could scarcely contemplate a few weeks ago.

But rather than wait for the opportunity to win back the Senate in 2012, when the seats up for grabs strongly favour Republicans, and perhaps send Obama back to Chicago into the bargain, the Tea Party is gambling everything on trying to have it all now.

This myopia could be Obama’s salvation. Throughout the debt debate, he had been a figure on the periphery, unable to control events and reduced on Friday to appealing plaintively to Americans to pressurise their members of Congress: “Make a phone call. Send an email. Tweet. Keep the pressure on Washington, and we can get past this.”

For the rest of the day, a stream of tweets flowed from Obama’s twitter account directing people to individual Republican senators and congressmen. The only tangible result was that nearly 37,00 people unfollowed him on Twitter.

Earlier in the week, Jon Stewart, the liberal comedian, had mocked Mr Obama for his strategy of appealing over the heads of Congress. “That’s your idea, call your congressman?” he asked. “Did the president just quit?”

Having failed to produce a White House debt ceiling plan – as with health care legislation, he chose the passive route of allowing Democrats in Congress to do the work for him – he had also neglected to push his agenda much beyond making a speech or statement every few days.

By last night, Obama had not spoken to Boehner – the central player in the debt debate last week – for five days. Senator Joe Manchin, a conservative Democrat and therefore a pivotal figure grumpled that he too had not heard from his President.

Obama, who arrived in Washington at the start of 2009 with ambitions to be a president to rival Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy, had been reduced to the role of bystander.

His ambitions to enact a transformational agenda by seizing on the economic crisis to move America decisively towards the European model of the welfare state are now in tatters. Progress towards his ambitious goal was halted in the November mid-terms when Americans opted for smaller, leaner government.

Republican strategists believe that they can turn this halt into a reversal in 2012. But Tea Partiers, believing their country is in peril, are impatient.

The likes of Boehner and Senate Mitch McConnell, Republican leader in the Senate, remember that the Republican Revolution of 1994 was effectively ended when their part over-reached and bore the brunt of the blame for the government shutdowns of 1995 and 1996.

If America does go into default this week, the economic consequences could be catastrophic. For Republicans, the political repercussions could be almost as serious, throwing Obama a lifeline even many Democrats believe he does not deserve.

Toby Harnden’s American Way column is published in the Sunday Telegraph each week.